Okay, so there's this thing deaf people can get now. It's called a cochlear implant.
Cochlear implants are made of miniprocessors and microphones and magnets, and they look sorta wacky, but that's not important. The important thing is that they make you hear. Not perfectly, but much better than you probably could before. As in, "Look at me, I can speak in a voice that doesn't remind people of humpback whale song" better. And wow, is it pissing some people off. I already knew deaf people were touchy, but Jesus.
And now, a weak justification of my grotesque generalization.
During my summers interning for the AARP in Washington, DC during college, I occasionally babysat the phones to the outside. Once in a great while, a deaf person would call, with the aid of an interpreter.
I tend to remember them as the most obnoxious calls I ever fielded. Take that however you want, I genuinely don't care. Maybe it was just one miserable shit calling over and over, I wouldn't know. What I do know is that his interpreters were always really, really good at communicating his disgust at my inability to use the mutant-calculator deaf phone.
What the fuck. First of all, it's not my fault it's not hooked up. Secondly, people called up en Español sometimes too, but none of them ever got rocks in their ass when I said no habla. I don't speak MOST languages, Gramps. Yours is just one of them.
Anyway, back to the movie.
The primary focus of Sound and Fury is a little deaf girl of about five, born of deaf parents, with two deaf siblings. She wants a cochlear implant, and her parents both have magnificent meltdowns, complete with hypocritical pronouncements and defenses of a handicap as the backbone of a "beautiful culture."
Gets better.
The secondary focus is two hearing parents, who have a deaf son and decide to implant him at 11 months so he'll develop normal speech. The baby's deaf grandmother calls her daughter a louse, accuses her of not loving her son the way he is, and interprets the move as her being ashamed of her own deaf parents.
Some highlights:
-- The deaf father of the little girl giving an spirited argument that deafness doesn't detract from a person's ability to succeed and learn, about three minutes before he discusses his own glass ceiling problems in the hearing world and his wife's absurdly poor reading skills. (She can't even read a recipe.)
-- The deaf baby's grandmother basically admitting that her primary concern would be that, if her grandson could hear, he would make fun of her when he got older.
-- The deaf parents coaching their deaf daughter in front of the cameras to say she was mistaken, she never wanted a cochlear implant at all.
-- The same deaf parents conferencing with the mother of a little girl WITH a cochlear implant, and becoming offended when the woman mentioned she wasn't teaching her daughter sign language. Later, when their own kid attempts to read a storybook out loud, her father becomes enraged and demands she sign it instead.
-- And, finally, that same father's fear that implants and constantly improving medical technology will one day render deaf people... GASP!... extinct.
All in all, a lot of crazy to pack into an hour and fifteen minutes.
And yes, I'm going to qualify it as crazy. Deafness is a disability. A disability that limits a person in obvious, tangible ways. It makes life hard, which is crummy. You can adjust, accept, and overcome, and a lot of people have done that beautifully. They can have pride in that, since having pride in your accomplishments is only natural. But pride in the disability itself is.. well, a little crazy. A lot crazy.
And guaranteeing that your own child is subject to the same disability you readily admit limits you? That's cruel. And selfish. And cowardly. And a whole lot of other words.
Of course, that's just an opinion. Feel free to ignore it.
Anyway, Sound and Fury is worth a look. I know it'll probably have me punching various hideous afflictions and deformities ammended with the words "culture" or "pride" into Google for at least a week.
